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HELP!

I watched "Who Do You Think You Are" last Friday and it lit a fire under my butt to get on with my ancestry research. I'm doing pretty well on my Dad's side, thanks to some info my dad's cousin put together umpteen years ago, but I am struggling with my Mom's side. We're like the family with no records, although I did manage to dig up a skeleton when I found out my great grandma had another husband! Mom's not handling it as well as I thought, lol. Unfortunately, I can't find any records other than his name and approximate year of birth in PA. My great grandpa is the same way...I can find record of his marriage to my great grandma, but that's about it. There's quite a bit of info on her side of the family, including the fact that I'm Welsh from her side as well (only thought it was on my Dad's mom's side). But the Duffys are a mystery, compounded by the fact that apparently Papa was disowned by his Catholic family when he married my great grandma. My grandma (mom's mom) is a mystery too, no birth or marriage records at all (that I can find). We think her family was Polish...or possibly German or Austrian, and when they came to the US they changed their name. Plus Granny was orphaned when she was 7, so that doesn't help. The LDS site has been wonderful, but I think I've maxed out the info I can get there, unless maybe I go to one of their libraries. I've been searching online and any leads I get are promptly hit with "join now to see this info" messages. I can't possibly join all those sites, so I'm asking if any of you have done this and what you might recommend. It seems Ancestry.com is where most links lead back to, but they sure want enough money to join!

I hate reinventing the wheel, so if anyone has any advice or suggestions, I'd love to hear it. I'd really like to pass this information on to Blake and Dee Dee, paired up with family pictures, so they can have some connection to our past.

Thanks in advance!

(My goal is to go to Ireland to continue the Duffy research...but I need a little more info to do that, I think. There's a whole lotta Duffys in Ireland! .

Yup.....go to the LDS library or Family History Center near you....hopefully you'll be as pleasantly surprised as my father was....and he did it just for giggles while mom was doing some serious searching.
I'll try to get you more info, but not until Sat., sorry

Good Luck

Check out footnote.com. For $11.95 per month you can have access to a ton of images and information. The site has been well worth the money.

http://www.footnote.com/

Beg - I did extensive genealogy on my father's side about 12 years ago (got back to the late 1700's). The best site I found with a comprehensive list of useful and good links was Cyindi's List http://www.cyndislist.com/

Good luck - it is a lot of fun!

I did a 30 day free trial at ancestry.com a while back when Caitlin had a school project.
It was super easy and VERY informative. Canceling after the 30 days was a breeze as well.....but I don't remember it being terribly expensive if you did want to keep it!

Oh and as for going to another country to find some long lost relatives - I did that in Scotland - it was a hoot! I got to meet a distant cousin.

pbans wrote:I did a 30 day free trial at ancestry.com a while back when Caitlin had a school project.
It was super easy and VERY informative. Canceling after the 30 days was a breeze as well.....but I don't remember it being terribly expensive if you did want to keep it!

I've done the same in the past but Ancestry.com is expensive....much of what you can find on ancestry can also be found on footnote.com. If you use the free familysearch.org site supported by LDS, with the footnote membership you can open some additional records (i.e 1860 census detail).

I have a membership to ancestry.com. I've found it extremely informative and easy to use. If you're after Civil War Confederate service records, footnote.com is better but if I were only going to pick one, I'd pick ancestry. Also, rootsweb.com can be very useful for finding family trees that others have posted, and it's free. Genealogy.dot has loads of free bulletin boards.

JollyMon66 wrote:

pbans wrote:I did a 30 day free trial at ancestry.com a while back when Caitlin had a school project.
It was super easy and VERY informative. Canceling after the 30 days was a breeze as well.....but I don't remember it being terribly expensive if you did want to keep it!

I've done the same in the past but Ancestry.com is expensive....much of what you can find on ancestry can also be found on footnote.com. If you use the free familysearch.org site supported by LDS, with the footnote membership you can open some additional records (i.e 1860 census detail).

It depends what you're after. Yes, ancestry is more expensive but if you want extensive census records over numerous decades I think it seems better than footnote. But like I said above, I think footnote is better at other things, like Civil War Confederate service records. That's why I have both....

Great ideas, keep 'em coming! I'll look into the sites mentioned, I may have looked at some but I know a lot of places bounced me back to ancestry.com

I know it would help if I could find a little more info on my paternal great grandfather and my maternal grandma...I'm hoping maybe one of my cousins might have some info or dates that I'm missing but I'm not holding my breath since most of them have no clue who our relatives were. Plus no one did obituaries on that side of the family so a wealth of info is missing from that source. Oh, and to make things more confusing...my Granny went by one spelling of her maiden name, her parents and at least one brother used a different one.

Has anyone used archives.com? Their fees seem more reasonable...a year is a little over what ancestry charges a month for their deluxe world membership. But maybe you get what you pay for. Ancestry only has a 14 day trial now, not 30. Poop.

I appreciate all the help. I've always been interested in my past but neither parent encouraged it. Finding some of the documents online brought me to tears. Maybe it comes from only knowing one set of grandparents. All my great grands died before I was born, as did my dad's parents (including my naturalist/teacher grandma, the one I'm so much alike), and my grandpa died when I was 5. I only had Granny, she passed away not long after I graduated from college.

Most of my relative's records are sealed by order of the courts.

http://www.familysearchlabs.org (this is an awesome beta site by LDS)

http://www.geneology.com (go to the message boards under "Community") found cousins there - we have the same gggrandparents!!! It was really alot of fun meeting them and they live 20 minutes from me!

http://www.rootsweb.com

Oh...and if you think they emigrated after 1898 (I think that's the date!) try the Ellis Island website....found the ships my grandparents took from Slovenia....and the copies of the orginal manifests from my grandparents and my dad...

chippewa wrote:Most of my relative's records are sealed by order of the courts.

That's okay....I'll still claim ya.

I'd also agree that the Ellis Island web site is helpful IF your family came through Ellis Island. Basically all sides of my family came over between 1700 and 1850. I have always found US Census records helpful in finding names and dates in my family. If you can get your family back to the mid-1800s often times this opens other information doors.

With that said there are two problems with the Census. One, 1850 was the first census to have all household names - men, women, and children. 1840 and before...only the held of house name was given and the number of other men, women, and children in the house were listed. The Census is helpful to trace a few generations and to see what ancestors did for living, where they lived, where their parents were born, etc.

The second problem with the Census is that old census records are sometimes not that accurate - especially when in comes to how old a person was when the census taker was on the property. My theory is that in the 1800's - early 1900's you had children and teenagers at home taking care of other kids. If the kid was the one giving the census taker the family information there is room for error.

Good luck - its a fun journey once you get moving and start having some sucess.

Brown Eyed Girl wrote:

chippewa wrote:Most of my relative's records are sealed by order of the courts.

That's okay....I'll still claim ya.

My grandfather and his brothers were bootleggers during Prohibition and according to family lore came mighty close to seeing a court more than once!

JollyMon66 wrote:

Brown Eyed Girl wrote:

chippewa wrote:Most of my relative's records are sealed by order of the courts.

That's okay....I'll still claim ya.

My grandfather and his brothers were bootleggers during Prohibition and according to family lore came mighty close to seeing a court more than once!

So you come from good stock!

Thanks for all the info, I'll definitely be in touch!

Mom set up an account recently on Ancestry. We have a lot of information on her side. She put my sister and I into the site and so I started putting in Dad's side of the family. We don't have much on my grandfather's side of the family. We have a lot for my grandmother.

My grandfather's father, abandoned the family when my grandpa was young. I'm not sure how young. But putting in the information we did have. We found someone by the same name, it says he died in 1920, but it also says he my grandfather had a brother born in 1920 and died in 1920. That would have made him 3 years old, he worked for the government and they did an extensive background check on him so I'm assuming he may have known all this but it's been a mystery to all of us.

Very exciting to find all of this.

I don't know much further back than my grandparents and don't really care to. I suppose it could be interesting but I'm not paying for it.
My wife tried one of them sites and did not get much from it.

sonofabeach wrote:I don't know much further back than my grandparents and don't really care to. I suppose it could be interesting but I'm not paying for it.
My wife tried one of them sites and did not get much from it.

It's definitely pretty interesting, I found a Civil War record for my grandmother's great-grandfather.

And I have to stand corrected on my earlier post, I read further and it was a 1920 census report. It didn't list my grandfather's father and "brother's" death but just their residence. So, who the hell knows what happened to them.

Nice QR code chip; I'll try to slow down.

What have people used for a family tree program to keep track of it all? Does ancestry do that?